IGN: Have you confirmed how many unrevealed classes there are, to round out the entire party?

Jay Wilson: There's one more.

IGN: You did mention that it's being revealed next year, and that it's someone from the previous games…

Jay Wilson: I did say that. I probably shouldn't have said that, because we're not sure that's going to be the case. It's just logical, that's what we tend to do. But it may or may not. I'm not gonna answer it, anyway… [laughs]

IGN: I do have a pretty granular, specific question for you, anyway. How do you personally lay your hands on it and play the game? You have to have your thumb on the Alt button, to get the loot that drops. You've got the four abilities there. You've got your pinky on the Tab so you can switch between abilities. It just seems like it might be an uncomfortable position to play, is it something you've looked at during testing?

Jay Wilson: Originally we used the Ctrl button as well, that was our swap button. We moved it to Tab, even though that's a controversial place, because I believe Tab was the map in D2. I didn't use it that way, but a lot of people did. So a controversial location for that. But one of the things we're trying to do is make the Alt button an option, something you don't have to hit very often. So what happens right now is, when items hit the ground, they show their tags. So you can pick them up and judge before they fade out. Also, if you walk offscreen and come back on, they show their tag. That's an option, people can shut it off if they want. That being said, it's always been our goal to figure out if we can get rid of the Alt button, because we don't necessarily like it hanging around down there. Ultimately the final solution for the player is to use their own key bindings. If they're uncomfortable with the position of anything they can move it around. There's not that many buttons, there's actually even less for us than there were for Diablo 2 because we don't use the F-keys at all.

IGN: Considering that this is the big debut for the redesigned Battle.net, have you figured out anything you're planning on doing, with the exception of things like, obviously, easier ways of setting up co-op lobbies or creating panels so that everybody can immediately jump in and start up exactly where they left off?

Jay Wilson: Well, for us, Battle.net is…we're not quite at that stage. The full extent of our Battle.net development is that we do run through Battle.net. Pretty much everything that we reveal about Battle.net is going to be introduced in Diablo 3. I won't go through all of this because I don't want to take all your time, but the social networking aspects, the easy communication across games, and definitely…some of our big hooks are really good matchmaking, there was some poor matchmaking in Diablo 2, it was kind of esoteric and hard to use. We want a platform that puts you right next to someone else who's into the same thing as you, at the same level. We want you to be able to open up that friends list and say, oh, my friend Steve's killing Diablo, join! And you're right there next to them. We want players to be able to play together very, very easily. That's going to be a lot of work.

IGN: It's the situation I had with Diablo 2, I would be seeing "Cows 555 Go Go Go" or "Cows 666 Go Go Go" over and over again. Diablo 3 will remove the need to make that kind of hackneyed solution?

Jay Wilson: We definitely want to do that. It's not in the game, so this is not a promise, but I can tell you that my desire for that is that you just be able to hit Escape, menu comes up, and you can say, I want to redo what we just did. I want to replay this part of the game, restart my game essentially, with all the same people. And I just get a confirmation thing, hey, you want to? If they say yes, we go, and if they say no, they stay in that same game. Somewhere a programmer's heart exploded, but that's our intent, that you shouldn't have to have this really convoluted way to replay content. One of the other things that we'd really like to focus on is, that the endgame not actually force you…well, it doesn't force you, it's your choice, but not make the most advantageous way to play be to do the same thing over and over again.

IGN: Yeah, I made a sorceress and exploited Magic Find suit, which was the way to get the best loot in the game and give it to all my other characters.

Jay Wilson: Good job, sir, that was the best way in Diablo 2…

IGN: So am I not going to have to do that in Diablo 3? How are you handling loot in this game?

BZ: There's a couple of answers there. The first one would be…how do we handle loot, you're really probably interested in how we handle Magic Find. For Magic Find, we like the idea of Magic Find, it's cool, something happens and all of a sudden I have a better chance of getting gear. But what we don't like is that it changes how you play to such a degree. I dump really good items because they're not Magic Find items. I play certain classes because they're the best classes for Magic Find. So we want to keep Magic Find, but we want to pull that out of the balance. The easiest way might be to not make it item-based, or if we make it item-based, to make it something you could put on anybody. Maybe there's some way to grant your items Magic Find on top of something, but then that maybe has some kind of inherent cost to it. So we haven't decided yet, that's why we're kind of talking in riddles, but the key is, we don't want players to play that way. We don't want players' items to be dictated by Magic Find. That's not fun. So the next one will be the fact that you probably used a sorceress, is my guess, and the reason you probably did that was because items were less valuable for the sorceress.

The sorceress could fight really well without items. That was a flaw in the item design, in that that class didn't need items as much. So that's something that we've already fixed, through the addition of real power as an attribute, as opposed to magical power as a magic damage attribute. So now to really do the kind of damage you're going to need to do to do those runs, you're going to need items. That's part of what we solved there. The one class won't be able to clear the table because it has no need for items. All the classes should equally need items and be able to use items. The last one is, a player's tendency is to follow the path of least resistance. We learned this in World of Warcraft, if you make the fastest way to level killing boars until your eyes bleed, then that's what players will do. They won't do the most fun thing. They'll do what gets them progression the fastest. So we put in this massive quest system, it's a ton of work, but what it does is, it says, go kill some dudes over there, run over there, grab me three of those things, do this thing over here. When the player's always doing something different, the game stays fresh, it stays fun to play for a long time.

This is the philosophy we've put into the Diablo endgame. So it's not that you're not doing runs, it's that you're not doing the same run over and over again. There's a reason for you to kill this boss, then that boss, then maybe explore that dungeon. There's a benefit that pushes you around through all the content. We have some systems planned for that, but that's definitely our focus, to get out of that…I'm doing one run over and over again, and get to the idea of, I'm doing every possible run that can be done. To show off the broadest array of content.

IGN: D2 had a relatively large story that was kind of broken up. Are you still planning on doing the same kind of chapterized settlements, or are you building one epic tale that starts and doesn't really stop until the end credits?

Jay Wilson: Our system is still in progress. It's pretty close to being locked down, we've just got a couple of little details we're working out. We do have acts, like Diablo 2 did. They serve a different role now, they're mostly to break up major chapters, major elements of the story. But they're not necessarily a box for content, because we break down even more so than we used to. We take an act and we break it down into smaller chapters, each chapter has a goal and everything. But the overall act structure is still in the game. Between each one there's a cinematic, it's a way of saying, here's where the cinematics go, here's where we go to a new environment you've never seen before, here's where we branch to the next step in the story.

One of the things we didn't like about Diablo 2 was that…the story was basically the same story in each act. You showed up in the town and the townspeople said, the demon went thataway. In here, every act is different. The first act is a little bit more of a mystery, there's this cult that has been operating in and around the rebuilt Tristram, you're trying to find out who they are. Act two's a little bit more of an intrigue and deception-focused story, because Belial is in there. Act three, there's a lot more.